I love failure and I want to fail more. While looking at videos over at Stanford’s Entrepreneur’s corner, I stumbled upon one video from Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins, the VC firm. What he says is true of the valley, and of entrepreneurship in general; one must embrace failure. ‘Fail often, fail fast‘ is a mantra typically enunciated by startup types.

This goes hand-in-hand with the idea that execution is king and rapid iteration comes to mind. There is no point to wait on the perfect idea, the perfect plan. Does that imply that we should throw away the adage ‘Measure twice, cut once‘?  But does that mean that we have a free  license to push out a lot of crappy code? I think not.

Another rule of thumb I came across was ‘Be pessimistic in the short term, optimistic in the long term‘ which I think ties both ideas together.

The time to act is NOW. The best plan to execute is the one right NOW. Innovation is driven by failure. Success is a by-product of failure… or is it?

I attended startupschool about a week ago and that was quite a blast. The folks at justin.tv and omnisio have got the video transcripts up, definitely worth a watch.

I missed the major parts of two talks, and by Murphy’s law, they just had to be two of the top 3 talks I wanted to hear; Paul Buchheit and Paul Graham. We had a production server outage, so I was furiously competing for wireless access point time with 400 other geeks (and PG during his talk… XD).

I did, however, manage to catch this quote from one of PG’s slides:

A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.

George S. Patton

US general (1885 – 1945)

I have recently been reading articles written by Frank Demmler. He’s a Prof at the business school of Carnegie Mellon University. He has seen the problem from all angles, having been in each position at one time or another and he shares his learnings in the series linked above. Be warned; some familarity with the ‘problem space’ and with the terms are needed, but Frank shares his personal learnings which will be a good refresher for veterans and a warning guide for wannabe-n00bs like me. Here’s an excerpt:

“One of things that continues to surprise me is that many board meetings that I have participated in or observed, have been largely a waste of time “


I concur!